How does the Seats.Aero service collect data for award seat availability?

Seats.Aero gathers its award‑seat information by automatically pulling data from airline loyalty programs rather than relying on users to search each carrier individually.

Data‑collection methods

• The service runs automated processes that scan the award‑space listings of many airline programs, capturing the available seats and storing them in a cache for instant searching. 🔗
• According to the lawsuit details, Seats.Aero used bots that performed both screen‑scraping and API‑scraping of Aeroplan (Air Canada’s loyalty program) to harvest large volumes of award data. 🔗
• Seats.Aero argues that the data it collects is publicly available through the airlines’ reservation systems or APIs, and it applies rate‑limiting to keep the request load low. 🔗
• The cached data is refreshed periodically, meaning the site does not query the airline’s website on every user request but relies on its own periodically updated database.🔗

How the cached approach works

• By scanning routes and programs in bulk, Seats.Aero can present a searchable list of award seats across roughly two dozen airline loyalty programs.
• Users see results instantly because the heavy lifting of data collection has already been done and stored, after which the platform sorts and filters the cached information.🔗

These practices allow Seats.Aero to provide a fast, multi‑program award‑search experience while relying on automated data collection from the airlines’ publicly accessible systems.